Relative surplus population and industrial revolution 4.0 in Chile

Relative surplus populations and the crises of contemporary capitalism: Reviving, revisiting, recasting

This paper offers the groundwork of an alternative to mainstream (un)employment theory that builds on Marx’s account of the ‘active army’ and ‘relative surplus population’. With special application to the current neoliberal era, Marx’s long-range labour market analysis is connected to a mid-range account of capitalism’s uneven development in historical practice. This alternative approach is then adapted to an ‘empirically adequate’ statistical mapping of the relative surplus population’s contemporary global composition. Under neoliberal global capitalism, the relative surplus population is identified as being larger than the active army, and is unevenly composed and distributed across developed, developing and underdeveloped countries.

This essay traces the intellectual history of the concepts ‘informal’ sector and ‘informal economy’ from Karl Marx to Arthur Lewis, Barry Bluestone, Keith Hart and S. V. Sethuraman.* It shows how the Marxian dynamics of ‘relative surplus population’ has been replaced by the concept of ‘informal economy’. It also discusses the dynamic role of population pressure on agriculture in many countries of the Global South. Finally, it is suggested that the strategies advocated by the International Labour Organization (ILO) since the 1970s have tended to narrow the areas of investigation promoted by them.

It is widely known that capitalistic accumulation or the development of productivity causes, through the process of high change in organic composition of the capital, relative surplus population or the unemployed labourers. Its inevitability can be explained by the law of disproportion in the capitalistic production. The labourers are at once attracted on the one hand and on the other repelled. In other words, employment and unemployment occur at the same time in the various enterprises of productive branches, and thus in the society as a whole relative surplus population or the unemployed labourers always exist and increase. Relative surplus population is thus the result of capitalistic accumulation and also a necessary condition for its development. The existence of the unemployed labourers plays a part of a lever for capitalistic accumulation. The fact has two aspects. In the first place, Capitalist production can by no means content itself with the quantity of disposable labour-power which the natural increase of population yields. It requires for its free play an industrial reserve army independent of these natural limits.'n) The unemployed are exactly what Marx called the human material always ready for use being independently of the limits of actual increase of population 2) and mean the existence of freely disposable labour power under the absolute control of the capital. Therefore, when the capital requires a greater amount of labour at the prosperous phase of economic cycle, relative surplus population answers that demand and supplies with labour power. The unemployed are produced as a result of multiplying in value of the capital in the process of progress of organic composition of the capital with disproportioned development, while the same factor causes them to function as a source of necessary additional labour power. Secondly, the existence of the unemployed lowers the various conditions

Situated in the context of the land and ocean grabs in Ghana post-2007–2008 global economic crises, this article argues that the country is experiencing “primitive accumulation” without capitalist industrialization. I draw on the insights of agrarian political economy to argue that this has created cheap laborers without industrial capital to exploit. The corollary of this is the creation of additional “relative surplus population”, worsening the country's (un)employment crisis. However, this “relative surplus population” is not marginal to global capitalist accumulation and exploitation; on the contrary, it is important to them. The article draws on ethnographic fieldwork in Ghanaian communities to document the voices of the dispossessed and semi-proletarianized about their experiences with the crisis of (re)production inflicted on them by global capitalism.

In this chapter, Otani looks at the influence capital accumulation has on the working class. A rise in the ratio of constant capital to variable capital is called a heightening of the composition of capital. The ratio of the increasing labour-power employed through the increase in overall capital is always becoming smaller vis-a-vis the overall increase in capital as a result of the heightening of the capital composition. This heightening leads to workers being let go due to the concentration of capital and the replacement of fixed capital. A relative surplus population is generated because the increase in the demand for labour through capital accumulation is not able to fully absorb the additional workers resulting from the increase in the working class and the workers who are let go due to the concentration of capital and fixed capital replacement. For capitalist production, the relative surplus population is a control valve for the working population that makes it possible to supply labour-power needed for sudden capital accumulation and to absorb the excessive working population.

This chapter theorises the inclusion of ‘diverse’ workers into global capitalism by means of platform crowdsourcing through the prism of the Marxian notion of ‘relative surplus population’, by which is meant ‘the portion of the working-age population, who are surplus to the immediate needs of capital for waged labour at any given place and time. It deals with a reading of crowdsourcing as transforming not only the socio-demographic and geographical composition of labour through the digitally mediated integration of part of the relative surplus population but also, by so doing, its relation to capital, weakening labour’s ability to obtain a living wage from the sale its labour power. The qualifier ‘relative’ points to this inextricable relationship of surplus populations to the cyclical expansion and contraction of capital accumulation. Crowdworkers find themselves in a particularly weak position to determine how much they work due to information asymmetries between workers, platforms, and clients.

In the past few decades, there has been a renewed interest by feminist scholars in social reproduction. Global South scholars have argued that in agrarian societies of the global South that are marked by a high prevalence of surplus population, social reproduction is largely the responsibility of households, facilitated through unpaid gendered labour that is mostly performed by women. In this article, I draw from the Mhlopheni case of former labour tenants who were evicted and later re‐claimed their land in South Africa to demonstrate the centrality of land in social reproduction. I argue that three processes are important and aid social reproduction: (i) land redistribution to the dispossessed, (ii) socially embedded tenure arrangements and (iii) unpaid gendered labour within households which is largely performed by women. These three processes reinforce each other. It is not just land that is crucial for social reproduction, but how that land is used, controlled, accessed and held, and the gendered labour required to turn resources into consumable goods that enable people to live. To support my argument, I draw on empirical evidence collected between 2020 and 2022 where I conducted 56 in‐depth interviews, four focus group discussions and a survey of 32 households.

ABSTRACTMany among the world’s population are surplus to the requirements of capital accumulation. These are people who become engaged in precarious employment both in rural and urban contexts and those who are involuntarily unemployed. Their presence has been particularly acute in “peripheral countries.” Mainstream economic literature explains this in terms of the dual labour market, where it is argued that surplus labour will eventually disappear with market-led economic development. Contrary to this explanation, this article argues, using Marx’s concept of relative surplus population (RSP), that under the existing neo-liberal framework such labour vulnerability is continually being created. This article charts the developmental history of Indonesia and demonstrates that the growth of RSP is an outcome of a neo-liberal transformation which favours capital accumulation at the service of global markets. Neo-liberal adjustments shape the development of RSP in three related ways. First, the adjustments change class relations and transform state orientation. Second, the reconfiguration of class dynamics and the state shapes the model of accumulation. Third, the model of accumulation eventually affects the size of RSP. It is argued that the disconnection between the domestic agricultural development and industrialisation has contributed to the maintenance of a large RSP in Indonesia.

This article explains independent Uzbekistan’s transformation starting from its integration into the global economy as a primary commodity exporter. It argues that, in line with other resource-rich countries of the Global South, this transformation exhibited two enduring and interlinked features, namely rent-subsidised ‘backward’ industrialisation and the rise of a vast relative surplus population (RSP). First, the end of collective agriculture expropriated most of the Uzbek rural population from the land, so rents from cotton exports could subsidise ‘backward’ industries manufacturing for the domestic market. Second, as these industries could only absorb a minority of the population due to their limited (largely domestic) scale of production, the majority was turned into a vast RSP that struggles in the informal sector, including as labour migrants. Third, cotton’s replacement by gold and natural gas as the main export commodities laid the basis for the current liberalisation. Still, Uzbekistan endures as a raw material exporter, hence as a ‘backward’ industrialiser and reservoir of RSP. As such, the paper problematises the transition literature’s framing of Uzbekistan as an example of failed reform or successful developmentalism, showing instead how these enduring features of its development paralleled similar dynamics in other raw-material-exporting countries of the Global South.

Existe cierta recuperación en las ciencias sociales en los últimos años del concepto de “superpoblación relativa”, entendida como una consecuencia inherente al desarrollo capitalista. Sin embargo, son pocas las estimaciones empíricas. Una divergencia en ellas es la forma de considerar a lo que las estadísticas laborales han denominado como “población inactiva”. En debate con estas mediciones, este artículo busca conceptualizar los sesgos que las distintas decisiones metodológicas producen en la estimación, especialmente en los países donde el capitalismo se encuentra más avanzado. Para ello, nos basamos en información estadística de diferentes organismos internacionales (Organización Internacional del Trabajo, Banco Mundial y Organización Naciones Unidas) para describir tendencias en el largo plazo en las últimas décadas hasta la actualidad e interpretar la forma en que pueden ser asociadas teóricamente con diferentes modalidades de la superpoblación relativa. Se pondrá especial foco en la vinculación de esta categoría con las siguientes porciones donde la inactividad es alta: adultos mayores, mujeres en edad laboral y jóvenes.Palabras clave: superpoblación – población inactiva – capitalismo Methodological problems for the measurement of relative surplus population: the portions disguised under the category of “inactive” and the bias in advanced capitalist countries. AbstractIn recent years, there has been a certain recovery in the social sciences of the concept of “relative surplus population”, understood as an inherent consequence of capitalist development. However, empirical estimates are few. One divergence in them is how to consider what labor statistics have termed the “inactive population”. In debate with these measurements, this article seeks to conceptualize the biases that different methodological decisions produce in the estimation, especially in countries where capitalism is more advanced. To this end, we rely on statistical information from different international organizations (ILO, World Bank and UN) to describe long-term trends over the last decades to the present and interpret how they can be theoretically associated with different forms of relative surplus population. Special focus will be placed on linking this category with the following portions where inactivity is high: older adults, working age women and youth.Key-words: surplus population – inactive population – capitalism

First-generation neo-Marxist class theorists advanced some way beyond the orthodox Marxist account that is grounded in a particular reading of the Communist Manifesto. However, capitalism’s changing reality since then has revealed the limited extent of their break with orthodoxy. With the support of Bhaskar’s critical realism and Gramsci’s philosophy of praxis, this article addresses these limitations to facilitate movement towards second-generation neo-Marxist class theory. Rather than following first-generation neo-Marxist Poulantzas who dismissed the ‘class-in-itself’/‘class-for-itself’ distinction as a non-Marxist Hegelian residue, this article treats it as the central problematic of Marx’s class theory. Bourdieu’s subjectivist reformulations of the distinction that resonates with Marxist interpretations that run counter to the neo-Marxist social scientific aspiration are also critically engaged. The innovative conceptual framework arising from the article’s critical engagement with these diverging intellectual trajectories is applied to sketch ‘class effects’ in-themselves especially around the theme of the ‘relative surplus population’. Expected class effects implied by the core dynamic of the capitalist mode of production, and then contemporary empirical effects generated by neoliberal-led global capitalism, are outlined. This re-conceptualisation is then supplemented by critically examining Beck’s argument that individualisation leads to capitalism without classes-for-themselves. The article concludes by reconsidering class-for-itself in the light of the preceding discussion.

This article brings in the concept of the ‘neoliberal model of development’ as a corrective to the prevailing emphasis in the literature that usefully describes neoliberalism as a nationally diverging phenomenon but does not adequately examine the mid-range trans-national/global regulatory connection or the logics of national convergence. By extending the concept of regulation and specifying the national trans-national connection, this article revises the original Parisian French Regulation School conception of a ‘model of development’ and makes it applicable to the contemporary neoliberal era. It then applies this revised conception to help explain contemporary patterns of national convergence and divergence. In particular, with reference to Marx’s theory of the ‘relative surplus population’, this article explores capitalism’s uneven development as a form of national variation intensified by the neoliberal model of development. This revisionist analysis of model of development also demonstrates how its praxis dimension is significant for explaining past and present mid-range variations of capitalism, and more importantly for making a mid-range counter-hegemonic future.

This paper contextualises contemporary precarity within a mid-range focus on labour market segmentation that takes Marx’s long-range theory of the ‘relative surplus population’ as its point of departure. It also briefly outlines an alternative ‘model of development’ which could address the increasing precarity of a growing proportion of the world’s population. It first sets out a critical analysis of core elements of mainstream accounts of the labour market, which is a point of comparison in the later sections. The paper ends with an exploratory discussion about how neo-Marxist analysis can supplement Keynesianism, and how both need to be re-focused more clearly on the need to design a post-neoliberal model of development.

Growth can be dangerous – especially when it displaces current forms of livelihood, and fails to provide viable alternatives. The old transition narratives – farm to factory, country to city, tradition to modernity – are still promulgated by development planners and they continue to have popular appeal but they are misleading. Tania Murray Li's editorial argues that emergent patterns of jobless growth, the uneven distribution of waged work, and the tendency of large scale farms and plantations to gobble up land and expel people should be a red flag: far too many people are being relegated to the position of a “relative surplus population.”